This night coming, a raid on free negroes in Delaware was to be made by
the band in force, and Levin had been told that he must be one of the
kidnappers, and his frank co-operation that night would forever relieve
him of any suspicions of defection and bad faith.
"Steal one nigger, Levin," Joe Johnson had said, "and then if ever
caught in the hock you never can snickle!"
Levin interpreted this thieves' language to mean that he must do a crime
to get the kidnappers' confidence.
The power of this band he had divined a little of when, at points along
the river, especially about Vienna, there had been mysterious
intercourse between Joe Johnson and people on the shore, carried on in
imitations of animal sounds; and the negro ferryman at that old
Dorchester village had spoken with Johnson only half an hour before the
trader's encounter with Jimmy Phoebus in mid-stream, whereupon the
grim passenger had produced his pistol and notified Levin:
"Now, my feller prig, honor's what I expect from you, and, to remind you
of it, Levin, I'm a-goin' to pint this barking-iron at your mummer, so
that if you patter a cackle, a blue plum will go right down your
throat."
He had then tried to evade some one expected on the river, and, in a fit
of rage at the awakening and wailing of the child, had hushed it
forever, and then had shot Phoebus down.
Poor Hominy had sincerely believed that Johnson's peculiar slang was the
language of the good Quakers, followers of Elias Hicks, who sheltered
runaway slaves and spoke a "thee" and "thou" and "verily," and that
strange misapprehension in her ignorant mind the keen dealer had made
use of to decoy her into Levin's vessel and waft her into a distant
country.
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